by David Ryker
Plan B was to create a distraction by shooting into the hab buildings and causing a ruckus. We hadn’t counted on Leka having a bra grenade, and though that certainly caused a ruckus, it was not at all what we had planned for.
The quads came bee-lining back, for one, firing indiscriminately through the air. The Belter ships - or whoever’s ships they were - had come back.
“Told you those damn things were invisible,” Curtis said.
“Come on!” Leka said.
By this point, the neat rows of prisoners were too panicked to care that the guards were shooting at people running. There were too many people running for the guards to hit, and when Leka pulled another grenade out I knew it was only going to get worse.
We were coming up to the Commissary by way of the back end of the hab buildings. This way, we’d look like prisoners who belonged here, who maybe hadn’t been evacuated on time. We ran shrieking along with Leka, who threw her grenade into the windowsill of one of the squat stone-block housing units and kept running as an explosion threw chunks of rock at our fleeing backs.
Tomlins definitely didn’t fake her shriek of pain when a cobblestone-sized piece of rubble hit her in the shoulder. I knew I deflected a couple off of my back, but it wasn’t enough to faze me - Salter, too, was unaffected by the blast. Curtis and Garcia were running too fast for it to catch up to them. Smart.
“Weapons!” I said, bringing my gun around from my back to the front as we neared the commissary building. People were now trying to get hell and gone from wherever the explosions were happening, which happened to be the buildings we were trying to get into for supplies.
I started taking shots at the guards before they noticed we were armed. After all this time, it was an automatic procedure: acquire target, lock on, fire. Repeat. My plasma rifle was still fully charged and I had nowhere to be that day. It was the guards or me.
And here’s the thing about shooting prison guards when you’re in the middle of a bunch of panicking prisoners: you start to get help pretty quick. A mob of prisoners covered the fallen guards like ants. Two guys started fighting over who got to take his gun.
“Into the commissary,” I said, pointing to our objective. I watched our six-o-clock; the quad was coming back, and I could see the gun hatches open.
“Quick!” Leka said as she sprinted across the remaining hundred yards of brickwork between her and the building. As she ran, she raised her rifle and took out another guard. Like meat left on the floor of a vorchor pit, he attracted another crowd of desperate prisoners.
Well, now they knew who to shoot at. I ran after Leka into one of the tawny stone buildings on the widest end of the row. Instantaneously, my eyes adjusted to the darkness inside. I raised the barrel of my rifle in case we were running into any new friends in here. We weren’t.
“Kitchen’s this way.” Leka’s voice came from around a corner. “Shit. What am I grabbing? Pasta bags. Bread.”
“Anything high-calorie,” I said as I went inside. “Peanut butter. Dehydrated meat.”
“I have egg noodles,” Leka said, her voice flat. “And a few loaves of moldy bread.”
“Just take anything you can find,” I said, opening cabinet doors looking for something useful. A pan would probably be handy for boiling water. I grabbed one and wondered how I was going to carry it as I looked for something else edible.
“Powdered eggs,” Leka said, tossing me a paperboard canister.
“Nice,” I said. It went in the pot.
Outside, I heard the rattle of a quad-copter’s guns.
“Motherfuck!” Curtis’s voice preceded Curtis inside the building. “They’re shooting at us, Chief!”
“I figured that out!” I said. “Where’s Salter?”
“I’m right here with these two,” he said. “We’ve been gathering blankets from the hab blocks.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It was my idea.” Tomlins came in with an armful of blankets and sheets. “Here,” she said. “We can each tie one of these into a pack, and then we have a windbreak and maybe some cordage.”
“Good thinking,” Leka said, taking a sheet from her and laying it out on the ground. Noodles and bread and a big bag of beans went into it, and she tied it up rapidly into an oblong bundle she could sling across her shoulder. “That’s called a manty where I’m from,” she said.
“That’s fucking brilliant,” Tomlins said, dropping her burden in front of her. “Everyone do what she did. We don’t have much time.”
I set my pan down and grabbed a blanket from the pile that Tomlins had dumped on the floor.
“You got a plan for getting us out of here?” Curtis said.
“That depends,” I said. “Was all that small arms fire out there from you guys?”
“About half of it,” Curtis said. “Those quads were splitting their attention between us and the guys shooting at the guards.”
“Then we’re gonna run for it along with everyone else,” I said. “We know where that footpath is. It’s our best bet.”
“But those aerial guns will shred us!” Garcia’s face drained of color. “We can’t…”
“There’s two quads,” I said, tying my sheet up around a bunch of food, knives, and implements that looked like they could come in handy. It was a long twist at first, around all your shit, and then a strong square knot between the two diagonal ends. Made a good pack.
“And more on the way,” Curtis said.
“But we’re dealing with a mass escape here,” Tomlins said. “We’ll just be six motherfuckers in the crowd, if we hurry.” She was slinging her impromptu pack over her back, tightening the knot one last time. “What do you say, assholes? Are we gonna do this, or are we gonna wait here to get executed?”
“Execution might not take as long,” Curtis pointed out. “I don’t wanna get hit by one of those…”
“We’re fuckin’ doing it,” Garcia said, clapping Curtis by the shoulder. “Put your pack on and get going before their backup shows up.”
Having gathered what supplies we could, the six of us started out the way we’d come in. The aerial guns were leaving us alone, but I could still hear them firing in the distance.
When we got to the front doorway, Salter yelled, “Run!”
Little fucker didn’t need to say a word. We all bolted for the edge of the valley as fast as we could, weapons in front of us and supplies on our backs. In our green jumpsuits, we looked little different from any other prisoner who was fleeing the scene.
There were a couple of fights still being decided between prisoners and guards. Two or three guards had formed up a squad on top of a vehicle, and they were holding off a crowd of green jumpsuits. The crowd was their only saving grace. Those that had weapons were too far away to use them, and they kept getting jostled by those without.
The majority of the jumpsuits were running in the same direction we were - across the valley, toward the footpath and the steep rocky slope and the jungle below. The quads’ backup hadn’t arrived yet, but it would be here soon. I could feel the pulse of additional engines moving up the valley.
“This way!” Tomlins yelled, pointing northeast. “There’s a secondary path!”
We all followed her down what was less of a path and more of a convenient arrangement of rubble. Salter and I were jumping from rock to rock, agile and strong and much more coordinated than Curtis and Garcia, who were stumbling behind us.
Leka was keeping up a short distance behind, though she was wheezing and coughing more as we got closer to the treeline.
“Don’t leave me,” she said when she saw me looking back at her.
“I won’t,” I said. “I…”
“No, you can’t,” Leka said, grinning at me with her ruined mouth. “I’m your medic. Remember?”
She had a point. “Tell me if you can’t go any further,” I said. “But we’re almost to the treeline, and those backup quads aren’t here yet.” I turned around and kept sprinting from rock to rock, focuse
d on the eaves of the jungle before me.
I was only about thirty yards away when the bullet hit my back.
9
I gasped for air instinctively; I wasn’t sure if I was getting any.
“Fuck!” I said, conscious of my body twisting around as I pitched downhill. I survived the slug’s impact, which told me it was from a handheld rifle and not one of the aerial guns. I made it for one stride, then two strides, then I stumbled on my own feet and fell about two yards down the rocky slope.
“Kev!” Tomlins was downhill.
“I’ve got him!” Leka’s voice was hoarse, and I heard her coughing as she neared me.
Oh, that stung.
I could feel exactly where the bullet had lodged - one of my ribs had stopped it from exiting my body just to the right of my sternum. I lay still and let my body do its work as Leka approached.
“It just grazed me,” I said. “I’ll be fine - I just hit my head.”
“Grazed you my ass,” Leka said as she approached. Her voice was low; she crouched over me and ripped my jumpsuit open where the bullet had entered. “That hit you square...in the back.”
I turned my head enough to see her face puzzling over my wound. I could feel it healing already. It would take hours before the bullet dissolved and I was back to normal, but my blood had probably already found its way back into my body.
“Just grazed you,” she said. “All right. What day is today?”
“It’s still April sixteenth,” I said.
“Can you get up?” Leka said.
“I think.” I took a hesitant breath, and my abdominal wall held. I took another breath. Okay.
“It just grazed you,” Leka said. “There should... Okay. Can you get up?”
“Help me,” I said, holding up an arm.
Leka took hold of my forearm and grunted as she squatted under my weight. I leaned heavily on her as I stood up; the effort of healing this wound was making me groggy.
“Come on,” I said. “We gotta get to the jungle.”
I could see the others waiting for me there, crouched behind vegetation as I shambled my way forward.
“Kev, are you all right?” Tomlins came cautiously out to meet me.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m just a little dazed.”
“I swear to God, I saw that guard’s bullet hit you in the…”
“Mr. Collins has dealt with worse,” Mr. Salter said. He was sitting cross-legged against a tree some ten or fifteen feet back from the treeline, smoking a cigar. “It’s best to leave him alone. Excess attention only encourages him to heal more slowly.”
“That’s some fuckin’ good luck you got,” Curtis said. “I would have thought you’d be dead.”
“Yeah, me too,” Leka said, rolling her eyes. “But I guess it was a glancing shot.” She had to know.
“You’ve had good luck today, Kev.” Something in Tomlins’s voice made me realize she, too, was thinking about today’s first burst of violence, and how quickly I’d healed up from that.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, let’s hope it holds out. I’m gonna need it if we keep running into situations like this.”
“Now that we’re in the jungle, we should be more or less safe from the quads,” Mr. Salter said. “From here on out, let’s avoid people as much as possible until we arrive at the PDS.”
“For once, I like this guy’s ideas,” Curtis said. “You don’t know what kind of crazy is getting turned loose with some of these riots, man.”
“Yeah, there’s a reason we took off from the rest of the guys on the sorting crew,” Garcia said. “Besides, I didn’t just risk my life grabbing all this shit to share it with some random fucker I just met.”
“I’m not arguing,” I said. Healed as my abdominal cavity was, I was still out of breath - the blood would save your life and keep you breathing, but it wouldn’t create a perfect seal right away. And you need a perfect seal on your abdominal cavity if you like breathing. Which I happened to. Very much.
I could feel Leka’s eyes on me. I glared at her.
“Well, where is the PDS from here?” Curtis said.
“The nearest one should be about twelve miles east,” I said.
“Out where Textiles is,” Curtis said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Have you been?”
“Naw,” Curtis said. “One of my cousins was in for distribution. They told me he got out.”
“I hope they were right,” Tomlins said. “Textiles is nasty. We’ll be able to smell it long before we get there.”
“I see you’ve been,” I said.
“They tried me out there a couple years ago.” She nodded. “Decided I was much less, uh, dangerous on the breaker belt.”
“I can see that,” Curtis said. “So what? Do we just start heading east?”
“That’s the plan,” Tomlins said. “Head east and stay the hell away from other people until we get to the PDS.”
As far as our plans so far had gone, I liked this one. This plan had us walking quietly through thick cover, unseen by the quad-copters thrumming overhead and by whatever had attacked the recycling op.
We were sticking pretty close to the top of the ridgeline that led east from the ceramics dump. God only knew what was hiding out in the deep valleys below us. Nobody wanted any more encounters like the one we’d had that morning.
Progress was slow in the thick jungle. By the time we started losing daylight, we hadn’t even made a mile.
“We need to find somewhere to make camp soon,” Curtis said. “I gotta rest.”
“Rest where?” Garcia said. “I’m not lying down on the ground here…”
“That’s what the blankets are for,” Leka said. “Glad I brought extras - you probably only thought to bring one.”
Without further ado, she set her pack down on the vine-covered ground at her feet and untied it. She took a blanket from her pack and a knife from her belt, and she started shredding the blanket into strips.
“Come on,” she said. “Get blankets and tie knots on the diagonal ends.”
It dawned on us all at once what she was having us do, and we all set in on the blankets as she cut makeshift ropes for us. The recycled fabric they used to make these wasn’t very comfortable, but it was cheap as dirt and twice as tough. Tying one up into a hammock was smart - better than anything I would have come up with.
And it kept the rest of our crew busy while Leka dragged me off behind a tree to examine the wound on my back.
“Holy shit,” she said. “It’s already forming scar tissue.”
“You’re seeing things,” I said. “It was never that bad of a wound to start with.”
“I am not seeing things,” Leka said. “You’re rapid-healing.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re…”
“You know exactly what the fuck I’m talking about,” Leka said. “Take your shirt off.”
“No!” I turned around and backed away from her.
“What?” Leka said. “You got something to hide under there?”
“Again, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, keeping my voice as low as I could. “You need to leave me the hell alone. I’m fine. The slug only grazed me, and what happened after that is my business and my business alone.”
“It’s not just your business out here,” Leka said. “We’re relying on each other, Kev, and we need to be able to trust one another.”
“You can trust me without making me get naked for you in the jungle,” I said.
Without another word, Leka walked forward and pulled down the zipper of my jumpsuit. She grabbed at the collar of my T-shirt; I jumped back and almost stumbled.
“What the fuck?” I said. “Have you lost your goddamn…”
“You have a scar on the crook of your neck, about three inches long and probably jagged,” Leka said in a deadly whisper. “Maybe you got tattoos put over it. Guessing by how you’re acting, you probably didn’t.”
“What the fuck do
you know about what scars I have?” I said.
“There’s something inside you,” Leka said. “Something that makes you...better.”
I was quiet, frowning at her. I could kill her easily, if I had to - she was kind of a big woman, but years working in circuit stripping had made her more fragile. I didn’t like thinking that, but she knew. About me, about the tech flowing in my bloodstream. I didn’t like the thought of how she knew any better than I liked the thought of killing her.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. Maybe she had some sympathy for me. Maybe, if she knew what the Belters had done with my body, she knew how badly I needed to get out of the Belters.
“No, I don’t have any idea,” Leka said. “I don’t have any idea if you’re even really human. You and Mr. Salter…” A bitter smile creased her face. “You and Mr. Salter are not the first Belters I’ve met.”
“Who else have you met?” I said.
“You’re expecting a lot of honesty from me, considering the secrets you’re keeping.” Leka turned around and walked back toward the group without giving me a chance to speak.
We passed the night sleeping in shifts, or at least trying to rest in our makeshift hammocks. Sleep was hard to come by in those circumstances, regardless of how exhausted we were. Curtis was the only one who passed out as soon as he was horizontal.
The silence, to me, was the most unnerving part. I was used to the sound of insects, of frogs, of engines thumping away in the night. I was used to the air around me being alive. There was no sound in this part of the jungle. There was no tension in the absence of sound. There may have been foliage and the occasional rustle in the leaves, but other than that the place was dead.
By the time we were all awake in the daylight, I could understand why. A thin yellow fog had crept in overnight, and an odd metallic tang was in the air.
“We have to get uphill,” Leka said. “This can’t be good.” The wheeze in her voice seemed to make her words a little weightier.